Disgraced John Edwards back in the spotlight

In the fall of 2006, John Edwards’ political high command began hearing disturbing reports from aides on the road. The candidate, they were told, was spending too much time with an eccentric filmmaker named Rielle Hunter.

So when Edwards and Hunter returned from his trip to Africa in early October, his former campaign manager Peter Scher confronted him: If Edwards was having an affair, he told the candidate flatly, he couldn’t run for president.

Edwards denied the affair, but Scher and other loyalists from his 2004 campaign doubted his word, made excuses, and stayed out of the 2008 presidential race when Edwards launched his campaign after Christmas.

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The concerted effort to keep the Enquirer story from reaching the average Iowa Caucus-goer was, a former top aide said, “a campaign within a campaign.” Even Edwards’ new top strategist, Trippi, was left off the first of the conference calls on the subject, which included some of the candidates’ 2004 circle who had taken a pass on the race, as well as aides who had stayed in 2006.

The aides ran a full-court press on reporters who asked about the Enquirer piece, asking them if they really planned to follow a supermarket tabloid and saying—accurately—that the evidence of the affair was thin.

For those who suspected the story was true, the real point of the effort was to prevent Elizabeth Edwards and their children from having to read about the candidate’s infidelities in the newspapers, one campaign insider said, but the effect was to keep Edwards’ shot at the White House alive.

“John was much more reluctant to continue the campaign than she was,” said a former aide who was present as they made their decision.